Traditionally, business has been conducted as a store front operation where customers had to be physically present at a store to conduct business. Customers may also have been able to request items for future delivery by calling the store or by writing a letter or filling out an order form which was later mailed to the store.
In recent years, however, there has been a tremendous shift in the way business is conducted. The telephone has become the new "front door" to businesses. As the use of 800 telephone numbers proliferated, customers had an alternative and most often more convenient way to conduct business. A physical presence at the store was no longer needed, only the ability to communicate was necessary.
In response to the growth in the use of the telephone by customers, call center technology was developed. Traditional call centers consist solely of customers trying to reach service agents by telephone. The calls are placed into a queue where they wait until a service agent is available to service them. In a call center, the private branch exchange, or PBX, is provided with what is commonly known as an automatic call distribution, or ACD, system. ACD systems are well known in the art and generally comprise customer administrable software that governs what happens to a call between arrival at the call center and the time the call is answered and processed by a service agent. The ACD system may, for instance, allow the caller to hear ringing, music or announcements about the company while waiting in the queue. In addition, the ACD system may perform functions of which the caller is not aware. These functions include using information gathered about the caller to access caller records or invoices which will later be used by the service agent, and routing the call to an appropriate available agent based on a variety of factors relating to the customer request or the service agents. Such factors include, for example, the geographical origin of the call indicated by the telephone number from which the call came, whether the call is a sales or service call, whether there should be a priority assigned to the call based on the caller, the type of skills necessary to properly service the request and the relative workloads of the service agents which may include when a particular agent is available to handle a call. The information may also include information such as the number that the customer called in order to obtain service, as in the case where a business uses separate numbers for sales and service. This information may be gathered in a variety of ways. For example, the caller may be prompted to enter information such as an account number, social security number or zip code, or may be prompted to choose from a menu of options. Also, some information is inherent in each call, such as the area code of the origin of the call, and can be gathered without the knowledge of the caller. Typically, the type of information used to route the calls is selectable and programmable by the organization utilizing the call center and the calls are ultimately routed based upon a set of programmable rules which utilize the information.
In addition, the PBX is typically provided with monitoring and reporting software that is able to monitor and report quantitative metrics relating to the customer requests, the individual service agents and the call center as a whole. An example of such software is Lucent Technologies, Inc.'s Call Management System, or CMS, and Basic Call Management System, or BCMS, software. For instance, this software can provide quantitative metrics relating to real time information such as the number of calls currently waiting in the call center queue and how long each call has been waiting. Also, the software can provide quantitative metrics relating to statistical information, such as the number of calls handled by the call center in a given day and the average process time of each call, and historical information, such as the volume of calls handled in a given day in a given year. Furthermore, quantitative metrics relating to the performance of individual service agents, such as the number of calls handled in a day and the average process time of each, can be gathered and reported. These exemplary quantitative metrics are provided for illustrative purposes only, and it should be understood that a large variety of other quantitative metrics could be measured as desired by a particular user.
Keeping up with the rising volume of calls can be costly and inefficient. Thus, in order to provide quality service in a cost effective manner, businesses developed alternative routes for customers to communicate their requests. Voice mail technology was provided to callers as an alternative to waiting in the queue for an available service agent. With the voice mail option, a caller can leave a message stating his or her request which is processed and serviced by a service agent at a later time. Other alternatives include media such as the facsimile, electronic mail via subscriber networks and the Internet, regular mail, such as a letter or a purchase order, video, and live multi-media requests from sources such as the Internet. Also, in some situations, the customer does not make the request at all, but instead their equipment does, as is the case with burglar or fire alarms. The requests can also originate from within the business operating the call center, as in the case where automatic subscription renewals are to be generated and sent to customers.
These alternatives provide the benefit of reducing the number of direct telephone calls that a business, and its service agents, must handle. Another benefit is that a customer is not forced to wait on the telephone in a queue in real time. Instead, the customer has left a proxy, in the form of a facsimile, a voice mail, a letter, an electronic mail message or video message, which is awaiting service. These alternatives, however, also have a price. Fragmenting customer service among these many media may result in an inability to monitor and report the performance of the call center for some or all of the media. Therefore, the business is unable to obtain a total picture of service quality. Also, when service requests come in by facsimile, regular mail, electronic mail, and the like, they are typically kept in a central location where they are either picked up by the service agents or manually distributed to the service agents. Thus, because humans are involved in the process of getting these types of service requests to the service agents, the more difficult request may be passed over or put aside. Also, often times these types of service requests are handled during service agent off-time, rather than on a first come, first serve basis. Accordingly, the true time it takes to handle these requests cannot be accurately tracked. Finally, it takes time for the request to get to the service agents in this manner and, in the meantime, customers may get tired of waiting and call in anyway.